The Necessity of Living Happy and Free

This book argues that art’s ability to embody ideas and values reveals why living happy and free is a universal human necessity. It claims that an aesthetic worldview offers the most compelling framework to understand this dynamic. Taking the post-pandemic environment as its starting point, life, happiness, and freedom are examined as global concepts. The book’s main premise contends that art is fundamentally the language of values, and that artistic artifacts—by their very nature—are imbued with humanistic consequence. A unique blend of pictorial analysis, art historical reference, and philosophical inquiry demonstrates what our aesthetic sensibilities reveal about life, happiness, and freedom within human affairs. The dialogue engages concepts such as trust, psychology, religion, mythology, nostalgia, honor, sacrifice, economics, and others. Overall, the relationship between art, aesthetics, and living happy and free unearths the profound necessity for human beings to find personal and existential meaning in the world. The book takes a universal and global angle on what makes us human. It challenges the nationalistic tenor of the concepts of life, happiness, and freedom in order to uncover the humanistic root of why such values are so important to contemporary life as a function of their anthropological roots in the past.